SO, you're
an actress: your soap opera is the highest-rated
television program of any kind in the country; people
everywhere worship the ground you walk on, and you're
only 21. What to do? Where to go? If you're
pint-sized Latina firecracker Salma Hayek, you
leave it all behind and head for Hollywood, where you
don't speak the language, nobody knows who you are, and
it's back to square one when it comes to building your
acting career.

A bona fide celebrity goddess in her native Mexico,
Hayek emigrated in 1991 to Los Angeles, where she
willingly plunged to the bottom of the heap in order to
take a shot at conquering Hollywood. Intensive lessons,
both in English and acting, paid handsome dividends in
1995, when the diminutive dynamo lit a fire under Antonio
Banderas in wunderkind director Robert Rodriguez's
balletic bullet ballad Desperado. Continuing to
collect hunky co-stars, Hayek struck sparks with a
Baldwin brother in both Fair Game and
Fled, and made an undead love slave out of George
Clooney in From Dusk 'Til Dawn. Salma Hayek
Internet shrines cropped up like weeds, and in 1997 the
sultry spitfire landed her first lead role in the
States, playing opposite Friends fave Matthew
Perry in the cross-cultural romantic comedy
Fools Rush In.

The daughter of a Lebanese-descended father and
a Spanish-descended mother, Hayek was born and
raised in Coatzacoalcos, Mexico. Determined to see that
her grandchild develop into a ravishing beauty, her
grandmother frequently shaved young Salma's head and
clipped her eyebrows, in the belief that such treatments
would add body and sheen to her granddaughter's thick
dark locks. Equally determined to see that she became
well-educated, Hayek's staunchly Catholic parents
shipped her off to a boarding school in Louisiana when
she was 12. While the beguiling youngster proved both
attentively studious and properly religious, she also
displayed a bent for mischief that she chiefly directed
against the long-suffering nuns who ran the school:
among other infamies, she once slipped into the faculty
dormitory and set all of the alarm clocks back three
hours. The end result of such she-nun-igans was that
Hayek ended up suspended and carted back home after just
two years. It only took her two more years to finish
high school, and her mother, fearful of the effects
"college boys" might have on her impressionable young
daughter, sent Hayek to Houston, where she lived with an
aunt until her 17th birthday.

Returning to Mexico once more, Hayek relocated to
Mexico City to attend college, where she commenced
international relations studies. Though she had harbored
acting ambitions since childhood, Hayek had for years
been reluctant to seriously pursue such a chancy
vocation for fear of alienating her parents. Ultimately,
she decided the path of the dutiful daughter and stable
career girl was one she could not bear to walk and
frankly confronted her parents about her aspiration. As
she later told one interviewer, "One day I took my dad
to lunch. I asked him if he believed in destiny and he
said, 'Yes.' And I said, 'Well, I believe it's my
destiny to become an actress.'" In spite of voluble
objections from her family and the derision and
disbelief of her friends, Hayek quit college and
determinedly embarked on an acting career. She first
found work in plays at neighborhood theaters, including
one assignment as the heroine of Aladdin and His
Marvelous Lamp. Several months of tireless stage
work led to jobs making television commercials, which in
turn yielded a casting in Nuevo Amanecer, a
popular daytime TV serial. With no more experience than
that to her credit, Hayek got herself cast as the title
character of a second serial, Teresa, the
phenomenal popularity of which almost immediately made
its fetching young star the most fanatically revered
actress in Mexico.

Not content to settle for the comparatively meager
rewards of superstardom, Mexican-style, Hayek set
her confident sights on Hollywood, and moved north in
1991. What followed thereafter was a taxing period of
adjustment, beginning with an 18-month hiatus from
acting that was primarily occupied with English lessons.
Also during that period, Hayek studied acting under
famed dramatician Stella Adler, and taught herself to
drive a car: two days of stick-shift driving convinced
her to switch to automatic, and she slowly acquainted
herself with the tangled maze of L.A.'s freeways by
continually requesting directions from her more
streetwise friends via her trusty cellular phone.
Hayek's first big break came in 1993, when she spent
four months auditioning for a headlining role in Allison
Anders's girlz-'n'-the-hood drama Mi Vida
Loca. Anders eventually cast another actress in the
desired-for lead assignment, but Hayek's tenacity so
impressed the director that she gave her a smaller part
in the film for the express purpose of enabling the
promising young actress to qualify for membership in the
Screen Actors Guild.

Other small roles followed, mostly on television, but
it was an appearance on a Spanish-language
cable-access talk show that led to Hayek's big
breakthrough. While in the process of planning a sequel
to his wildly successful debut film, El Mariachi,
Mexican-American director Robert Rodriguez happened
to tune in to Hayek's talk show appearance during a fit
of late-night channel surfing. Mesmerized by the
lovely and engaging actress, Rodriguez wasted no time
tracking her down, and soon secured her interest in
tackling the female lead in his
soon-to-be-produced big-studio
debut, Desperado. Rodriguez's financial backers
initially resisted his choice of Hayek, but the director
won them over by showcasing her in his
made-for-cable installment of Showtime's Rebel
Highway series, Roadracers. A solid commercial
success, Desperado also garnered Hayek rave
reviews for her show-stopping, saliva-inducing
performance. Despite the fact she was disappointingly
underrepresented in her next two outings, in the limp
thrillers Fair Game and Fled, Hayek's
performances nevertheless provided much-needed zip
for both projects, and 1997 found her nicely
romantically matched in both Fools Rush In and
TNT's adaptation of The Hunchback of Notre Dame,
in which she portrayed Esmerelda to Mandy Patinkin's
Quasimodo.

Hayek's film agenda continues to offer a steady diet
of roles: She followed her turn in the disco redux
54 with an appearance alongsideWill
Smith and Kevin
Kline in Wild Wild West, and co-starred with
Ben
Affleck, Matt
Damon, Chris
Rock, Linda Fiorentino, and Alan Rickman in Kevin
Smith's Dogma. Through her Ventanarosa production
company, she co-produced The Velocity of Gary, an
offbeat romantic comedy which teamed her with Ethan
Hawke and Vincent
D'Onofrio, and another of her co-productions, the
Mexican feature No One Writes to the Colonel, was
recently in competition at Cannes. Hayek is currently
filming the biopic Frida, in which she tackles a
much-coveted portrayal of painter Frida Kahlo.

On a more personal note, Hayek is romantically
attached to actor Ed
Norton.